The following is an earlier version of a paper published by The Objectivist Center, in Objectivist Studies no. 3, as commentary on Rod Long's paper "Reason and Value: Aristotle vs. Rand".
In Ayn Rand's approach to ethics, I would name four principles which are Rand's original contribution, and which set her apart from other thinkers, such as Aristotle or the thinkers of the enlightenment, to whom she is otherwise similar. These principles are:
(1) Life (rather than flourishing, or "the good life") as the standard of value.
(2) The choice to live as the base of ethics.(3) The principle that there are no conflicts of interest among rational men.
(4) The virtue of productivity, and the moral significance of material production.
My purpose in this essay is to discuss point no. 1 --- life as the standard of value --- and its essential differences from some neo-Aristotelian views.
Like other organisms, man needs to act in order to survive; but unlike other organisms, man does not take the needed actions automatically. Man must choose to act to sustain his own life, and find out how to do so. That is why man needs morality. The standard of moral value, therefore, is man's survival.
This view is original to Rand. The Aristotelian view takes the standard of value to be flourishing, or "the good life". Objectivism regards this as a perfectly valid concept (though rather than "flourishing", Objectivists more often use Rand's phrase "man's life qua man"); but for Objectivism, flourishing, or "man's life qua man", consists of those principles of action which man needs to act on in order to survive.
Neo-Aristotelian thinkers, who don't accept a necessary connection of flourishing to survival, have never been able to provide an objective method for telling what the good life consists of, and whether living a certain way is or is not flourishing. Most such thinkers do express strong judgments on these questions; there are debates among Aristotelian thinkers, in which both sides are in complete agreement with each other about the foundations of ethics, and yet reach very different value judgments [1]. The crucial point here is that Aristotelian thinkers have no way to prove their judgments based on facts; ultimately, their method comes down to "you can just see, by observing a person living this way, that he is (or is not) living a good life"; and their debates, as a result, are irresolveable.
Aristotle places great emphasis on the need for experience in virtue; a virtuous person has developed, through experience, his "practical wisdom", i.e. his ability to judge what actions would or would not be part of his flourishing. But Aristotle never says that a person with practical wisdom would be able to give evidence for his judgments, and explain them to a less experienced person. For me personally, that has always been the aspect of Aristotle's ethics that I liked the least; it seems to justify the attitude which, as a child, I encountered in many adults and deeply resented, i.e. the attitude that because of their claim to greater experience they know better than I do and have no need to give me any reasons. The use of "flourishing" as the standard of value naturally leads to this kind of approach; it is a standard that does not allow for an objective grounds for giving reasons, and so all that's left is people's different intuitions of what the good life consists of, and "experience" as the only semi-reasonable criterion for distinguishing good intuitions from bad ones.
This aspect of Aristotle's ethics has been corrected by Rand. Rand's approach provides a principled criterion, based on the facts, for what is or is not part of the good life; something is part of the good life if it contributes to one's survival. On Rand's approach, therefore, value judgments are basically the same as medical judgments, and can be argued for and proven the same way: by identifying the evidence for what in fact contributes to man's survival. Contrary to the Aristotelian approach, there is no need to rely on intuition, or on "experience" without explanation, and disagreements are resolveable by the evidence.
Central to Rand's approach to ethics is her view of values as objective, rather than intrinsic or subjective. Her definition of the good life, and of the foundation of value, is essential to the objectivity of her approach. The good is not good in itself, neither in the Kantian sense of duty divorced from man's good, nor in the Aristotelian sense of being an aspect of man's good life; nor is the good determined by man's wishes or conventions. The good is determined by the requirements of man's survival, which are determined by his nature. We discover what is the good life, as we discover all other facts, by observation.
Like all objective concepts, the concept of the good life is open-ended; new knowledge can change our understanding of the good life, or even change some aspects of the nature of the good life (for example, the industrial revolution has significantly changed, and enhanced, the role of reason in man's survival, and, consequently, its role in the good life). However, the criterion for the good life, and the basic method for discovering it, remain the same.